madame scientist's not-so-mad musings

Was Matisse a Neuroscientist?: Henri Matisse was a master of the Modernist movement. His art exploded with colors, leading one outraged critic to exclaim, “A pot of paint has been flung in the face of the public!”. If you have ever tried to paint, you quickly learn (to your chagrin) that the bright red that looks so good when you first apply brush to canvas becomes disappointingly different when you paint in the background. The brain “mixes and muddles” adjacent colors. So what was Matisse’s secret?

• Achromatic shielding: Notice that Matisse leaves portions of the raw canvas untouched. These white (or black lined) regions separate different colors, insulating them against chromatic induction, and allowing him to use vibrant, saturated colors, often straight from the tube. To see illusions of color changes depending on the surrounding colors: http://goo.gl/SWFJ7

• Color perception: Starting with cone-shaped photoreceptor cells in our retina, electrical signals travel to at least five different cortical regions where they are decoded and interpreted based on complex calculations and prior experience before being assigned a color. No wonder that neuroscientist Eric Kandel said, “a painting isn’t complete without its beholder,”

• Matisse understood the importance of achromatic shielding. He said, “If upon a white canvas I set down some sensations of blue, of green, of red, each new stroke diminishes the importance of the preceding ones. Suppose I have to paint an interior: I have before me a cupboard; it gives me a sensation of vivid red, and I put down a red that satisfies me. A relation is established between this red and the white of the canvas. Let me put a green near the red, and make the floor yellow; and again there will be relationships between the green or yellow and the white of the canvas which satisfy me. But these different tones mutually weaken one another. It is necessary that the diverse marks [signes] I use be balanced so that they do not destroy each other.” Color shielding comes with a cost: Matisse’s paintings appear flat, sacrificing depth for hue.

Read more: http://goo.gl/f1jLJ

Ref: Color consilience: color through the lens of art practice, history, philosophy, and neuroscience.  Bevil R. Conway (2012) Annals of the NY Acad. Sci. DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-6632.2012.06470.x

Roger Keith “Syd” Barrett (6 January 1946 – 7 July 2006): Founding member of Pink Floyd, and all round “crazy diamond” died on this day after a self-imposed exile in his Cambridge home for more than 30 years. Syd only recorded four singles with Pink Floyd, the band’s debut album (Piper at the Gates of Dawn) and contributed to A Saucerful of Secrets.

Octopus is his solo single, recorded in 1969.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_6PhexCMow

LIVING FOSSIL: Did you know that Ginkgo biloba is the only species remaining of a genus dating back 270 million years to the Permian era (before the time of dinosaurs)? Once widespread, they shrank in distribution around 2 million years ago to a tiny area of central China. Originally thought to be extinct, there is speculation that the existing trees were planted and preserved by Chinese monks over thousands of years, because they are genetically so uniform.  Extremely slow growing, some trees are >2,000 years old.

• Ginkgo evolved before flowering plants. There are separate male and female trees. The female has “naked” ovules (hence the term gymnosperm).  Pollen deposited on the ovules contains motile sperm armed with thousands of flagella. The seed that develops contains butanoic acid, which gives it the smell of butter (unfortunately, rancid butter) and caproic acid which has been charmingly likened to “old gym socks”. Despite this, they are cooked into congee and Buddha’s Delight. Thought to have aphrodisiac qualities, the seeds contain ginkgotoxin that can cause seizures.

More images/videos on this site: http://kwanten.home.xs4all.nl/ovule.htm

I liked this 5 minute video, in Japanese, showing swimming sperm: http://cgi2.nhk.or.jp/school/movie/bangumi.cgi?das_id=D0005100132_00000

• Ginkgo extracts are thought to have memory boosting and anti-dementia properties from flavonoid glycosides and terpenoids. Clinical trials, unfortunately, show conflicting results.  See Wiki for a summary: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ginkgo_biloba

IMAGE: Kevin Staff made this lovely companion gif to accompany the networked leaf on the You’re So Vein post. Note that the ancient Ginkgo leaf is susceptible to damage in the central vein as seen by the block in fluorescent dye flow. Contrast this to the more evolved modern leaf with its efficient, recursively looped network (http://goo.gl/Xz8iT).

Early submission for ScienceSunday curated this weekend by Robby Bowles , Chad Haney and special guest curator Rich Pollett while I am traveling.

PULP FICTION? The clementine on the left was peeled, dissected to remove the pith and separate the segments, then neatly stitched back together by a laparoscopic surgeon. The sorry mess on the right was the artistry of a medical student. The trick was to do the entire “surgery” inside a closed opaque box fitted with cameras, scissors and surgical tools. Orange you glad they get to practice first?

 • Pamela Andreatta is an educator, not a surgeon, at U Michigan. She noticed that residents and interns struggled at laparoscopic surgery, to the detriment of the patient. So she came up with a low cost training alternative. Surgeons say that the exercise is a remarkable simulation of the pelvic anatomy.

• The fruit of their labor can now be transplanted in any country (it is being field tested in Ghana). Students who cannot concentrate will be canned.

Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2012/06/27/155838967/what-clementines-can-teach-surgeons

PACMAN 3D STREET ART Dutch artist Leon Keer recreates the beloved eighties arcade game with his larger than life street paintings 🙂

More amazing views: http://www.streetpainting3d.com/3d-streetpainting-pac-man

Surprise of the Day: ScienceSunday nomination via Allison Sekuler who writes:

“I went to vote in the Media Tapper  1st Annual Spirit of Google+ and was pleasantly surprised to see our page, ScienceSunday , listed as a nominee in one of the categories: Best Business Page! We’re not actually a business – we’re just a collection of scientists – me, Robby Bowles  , Rajini Rao  , and Chad Haney  – with a passion for sharing all the great science-related art, stories, videos, blogs, and song the G+niuses on Google+ pass our way.  But it’s still an incredible honour to be included with some of the other great nominees in that category. It’s also great to see a number  of other science pages/scientists including across the various categories. This is one of the things that makes Google+ such a wonderful place to be – people here really understand that science is everywhere and in everything 😉

Thanks to all the regular and irregular contributors to ScienceSunday  – we are nothing without you!” 

#sciencesunday   #scienceeveryday   

Originally shared by ****

Time To Vote

Thanks to all who have made the nominating process for 1st Annual Media Tapper Spirit of Google+ such a success. So many of you took the time to let us know which people you felt emulated the spirit of what makes Google+ such a great social gathering place at both our article and our G+ page. But now it is time to vote and help us find the top three Plussers in each category.

 

As a reminder, here are the 10 categories we chose for this year’s awards:

#1  G+ Photographer: Under 50K followers

#2  G+ Photographer: Over 50K followers

#3  G+ Hangout User

#4  G+ Writer/Storyteller

#5  G+ Most Informed About Google+ (how to use it)

#6  G+ Most Helpful (non Google+ related)

#7  G+ User You’d Most Like To Meet IRL

#8  G+ User You’d Most Like To See as Google+ Spokesperson

#9  G+ Best Business Page 

#10 G+ Artist (non-photographer)

Not only were you all kind enough to nominate your favorites but you also gave us some wonderful feedback as to other categories we can add next time. Thank you! 

We ended up putting our heads together, putting down names, adding things up and found 10 contenders for each category.

Now the fun really begins: it’s time to vote.

Click on the link below and you will be taken to our survey, Spirit of Google+ Awards, courtesy of Polldaddy. There you will find the names of 10 people per category. Choose one in each category and when finished simply hit the submit button. That’s all there is to it! 

Voting ends on Monday, June 25, 2012 at Midnight US Eastern Time. Winners will be announced on Thursday June 28, 2012: the same day that Google+ commemorates its first anniversary of going live. 

http://media-tapper-voting.polldaddy.com/s/spirit-of-google-plus-awards

Good luck to everyone and again, thank you for participating!

We are sorry to say that it is impossible to list every nominee with links to their G+ page so that you may have a better idea of who to vote for. 

http://mediatapper.com/time-to-vote-spirit-of-google-awards/